Thursday, May 10, 2007

"Are you confused by the ever-shifting terminology employed by the Masters of War and their frequent banquet buddies, the Media Mavens, when conveying the overarching geostrategic sociopolitical complexities of the Dear Leader's liberation of Iraq? Well, fear not, befuddled reader; your humble correspondent is here to help, with this handy-dandy update of The Newspeak Lexicon.

Today's phrase is: "Political Progress." This sinuous and supple little passage has greased many a clumsy reality over the transom of public discourse, allowing both purveyors and consumers of conventional wisdom to ignore the incontinent, pustulous, blood-smeared elephant of aggressive war standing there stinking up the well-appointed drawing rooms of the American Establishment......

Thankfully, the New York Times is on the case. In a prominent story there today, we learn that "political progress" in Iraq now consists of one of the major parties in the government deciding not to quit. Yet.......

So there you are. We have American casualties swelling with the still-rising wave of the Bush-McCain-Romney-Giuliani-Lieberman surge, with even more deaths expected as the escalation crests. We have American soldiers flung into the brutal service of the Bush Regime's criminal enterprise becoming more brutalized and criminalized themselves – with thousands of troops admitting that they have beaten or despoiled innocent civilians, and tens of thousands embracing the torture of prisoners and rejecting the very notion that the people they have come to "liberate" should be treated with dignity and respect, according to the Pentagon's own examination of the fraying mental health of its forces. We have Iraqi citizens cowering in fear of the American-trained "security" forces of their own government. We have the ghetto-building campaign by the occupying liberators sealing whole quadrants of Baghdad into open-air prisons whose inhabitants are left to the tender mercies of the violent sectarians locked in with them, creating "mini-Islamic republics," as one Iraqi government official admitted to The Independent. We have literally millions of Iraqis fleeing their homes, eating the bitter bread of exile in foreign lands or else on the run from ethnic cleansing inside Iraq – one of the greatest population displacements since World War II. We have a never-ending hellstorm of death and chaos, lies and looting, incompetence and arrogance – and unfathomable, unendurable human suffering – all of it spawned by the illegal, immoral and unnecessary war of aggression launched at the order of George W. Bush, and championed or countenanced for years by the "great and the good" of American society.

But the fact that one of the political factions licensed by the conquerors has decided not to leave the government for the time being means that "political progress" is being made in Iraq. So says the supreme arbiter of conventional wisdom in the American press."